Kirk's tombstone has "James R. Kirk" on it, even though his middle initial is later well established as T.

Kirk achieves a winning position in his chess match with Spock because he makes what Spock believes to be an illogical move. How on Earth can a move which puts you into a winning position be considered an illogical one? Contrary to popular belief chess is certainly a game whose great players can and do display a high degree of intuition - the image of the perfect chess player as a cold, calculating emotionless machine is false, or at least very incomplete. So it is indeed plausible that Spock might have a very logical method of playing, always making the moves that he calculated would help him the most - playing like a chess machine plays, in other words - whilst Kirk could be inferior in that respect but still win because he had a greater intuitive feel for the game. That's fine! But to take that down to a level where one individual move will convert the entire game from a what appeared to be a certain loss into what appears to be a certain win is pretty ridiculous.

Sulu's countdown clock doesn't count the time off correctly, a nit that is fixed in the remastered version of the episode where the old geared clock display is replaced with a digital version.

Balok announces each minute over the comm link, leading Sulu to smile and say "I knew he would!" when the last minute comes. However, they forgot to dub in Balock's one minute announcement so Sulu is responding to nothing. And even though there is a clip of Balok saying there is a minute left in the trailer for the episode, nobody ever thought to dub it in to the episode to fix this nit.

Scotty claims that eveyone should crouch down as he transports them as it is quite cramped in Balok's ship. And indeed when they beam in, the ceiling is quite low... in the spot them beam in to. But the odd thing is, everywhere else that we see it's more than high enough for everyone to stand upright. Scotty picked the one spot where they had to crouch as his beam-in point... I think he just wanted to make Kirk look silly.

As alluded to in the review, the most commonly asked question regarding this episode is "why didn't the Enterprise just send a shuttle down?" The ship was presumably not carrying those handy little craft on this mission for some reason! In fairness, this wasn't so much a writer mistake. Rather, this was such an early episode that they hadn't decided that such a thing as a hangar full of shuttles even existed yet.

In a log entry, Spock describes himself as the "Second Officer". Subsequently he would always be called the "First Officer"

Okay, you want to be really nitpicky? When Kirk is under the influence of the water virus, he is fantasising about being on a beach with a woman... 'a few days, no braid on my shoulder.' Well, Kirk's uniform doesn't have braid on the shoulders. Yeah, I know, poetic license and all that.

McCoy rips Kirk's uniform open to inject straight into his skin. First off, the uniform rips awful easily. No wonder Kirk was forever going shirtless, the uniforms fall apart at a touch! Secondly, it's been seen on several occasions that hyposprays can inject through clothing.

When he's all distraught in the recreation room, Tormolen says to Sulu "You don't rank me!" In fact since Sulu is a Lieutenant and Tormolen is a Lieutenant JG, Sulu does indeed rank him. We can forgive this one, I guess, since Tormolen wasn't exactly in his right mind.

Just after Charlie's card tricks he meets Kirk in the corridor. They both enter a turbolift to go to the bridge. On entering, Kirk is wearing his standard yellow command shirt, but when he gets out of the lift he's changed to his green v-neck one. Maybe Charlie used his special powers to change Kirk's clothing?

The Antares is variously referred to as a cargo ship, transport ship, a science probe vessel and a survey ship. That's one handy little vessel!

The Romulan ship is using 'simple impulse power only' and yet crossed vast distances during the episode.

In this episode Spock declares cast rodinium to be the hardest substance known to Federation science. Yet in "Arena", Kirk claims that diamonds are "perhaps the hardest substance known in the universe".

Isn't it a bit odd that Kirk is able to strangle Korby? Korby, remember, the man who turns out to be an android?

Look at the weapon Andrea uses to kill the Android Kirk. It's the exact same weapon which was used in the original pilot episode "The Menagerie". There it was called a laser, but here it looks, sounds and behaves like a phaser.

Incidentally, it's not a nit as such but when Spock asks Christine if she is sure that was Korby's voice, she rather smugly asks him "Have you ever been engaged, Mr Spock?!" and smiles as if she's just won a "take that!" point. Well, keeping what we will learn in Amok Time in mind, I can never help but imagine him responding with "Why yes, in fact it's MORE than an engagement, so take that!"

Whilst Miri's planet is identical to Earth in terms of the geography, it has one huge difference from our planet - there isn't a single cloud visible anywhere in the world. This is something changed in the remastered version.

When McCoy offers Spock a drink he refuses, saying his ancestors where spared it's effects. McCoy claims that this is probably why they where conquered. However, we hear in "The Immunity Syndrome" that the Vulcans have never been conquered.

When Kirk hears that there are five survivors on the shuttle, he smiles and gets on with his job. Although attention to his work is fairly laudable, it could be his two best friends that are dead! You would think he would take a little time to find out.

This episode features a heroic effort by Leonard Nimoy to convince us that his leg is pinned by a heavy rock, when in fact it is very obviously just a lump of polystyrene that is so light he has to hold it in place.

Kirk claims at one point that the audio sensor can be boosted to one to the fourth power. However, one to any power is still one! He likely intended to say "ten to the fourth power", which would be 10,000 times amplification.

In this episode Spock states that it is impossible that Kirk jettisoned the pod before he was supposed to, stating "human beings have characteristics just as inanimate objects do. It is impossible for Captain Kirk to act out of panic or malice. It is not his nature." Yet in "Day of the Dove", when asked if Kang's wife can guarantee that he will listen to Kirk's peace offer, Spock states that "No one can guarantee the actions of another." So which is it?

Come to that, why don't they just put Kirk under a lie detector and ask him if he hit that button? For the forgetful, Wolf in the Fold states that the Enterprise computer can make a recording of the registrations both the conscious and subconscious mind, detailing what a person did in the recent past even if that person does not remember what they did.

Behold the marvel of the 23rd century that is Fleet Captain Pike's chair and communication system. He has a light, which he flashes once for "yes" and twice for "no". Contrast that with what we've accomplished in the backwards era of the early 21st century - Professor Stephen Hawking, for instance, is at least as badly incapacitated as Pike is. Yet he can communicate very effectively, if a little slowly. Yeah, I know, there's no way they could have foreseen any of that in the 1960s.

Look at the report that Kirk reads about the Enterprise's visit to Talos IV. It actually says in the report that the USS Enterprise was "commanded by Captain Christopher Pike with Half-Vulcan Science Officer Spock". It even has it again at the bottom of the report where the two officers sign off on it. Um.... really? They specify people's racial status in their reports? Or at least, they specify non-Human people's species - notice it doesn't say "Commanded by Human Captain Christopher Pike", which would at least be consistent, if still a bit weird. It makes Starfleet seem oddly racist.

Yet again, nobody thinks to power up a shuttle and go rescue the boss!

The fighter plane changes type several times. One might speculate that the planet built several different aircraft, or rebuilt it whilst in the air, but sometimes it changes type literally from one shot to the next. In some shots there is even a second aircraft.

The episode features Barbara Baldavin, who played Ensign Angela Martine in "Balance of Terror". She's also referred to as Angela in this episode too... but when Kirk beams down, he refers to her as "Teller".

It's established at the start of the episode that they are 900 light years from earth, thus Trelane's information should be this much out of date. However, he talks of Napoleon who lived only 467 years ago.

When the Metrons return Kirk to the ship are we really to believe that they wash his face, clean his clothes and heal his leg?

Kirk claims that diamonds are "perhaps the hardest substance known in the universe". Yet in "Obsession" Spock and Kirk discuss the fact that tritanium is 21.4 times as hard as diamond... whilst in "Balance of Terror", Spock declares that cast rodinium is "the hardest substance known to our science."

The Commodore claims that the energy distortions where felt throughout every quadrant of the galaxy and far beyond. How does he know, they'd only explored a small fraction of the Alpha quadrant by this time!

When Khan shuts down life support on the bridge Kirk orders commendations for five of those present. There are, however, seven people on the bridge. Don't the other two deserve a commendation as well?

Khan makes a statement in this episode that really doesn't ring true. Bemoaning the lack of progress in Humanity over the last two centuries he comments that if one improves a machine one might double productivity, but if one improved Man himself the one could gain a thousandfold. This is simply the exact opposite of the truth. Khan himself claims to have five times Kirk's strength. So if a job involved lifting heavy loads, he might increase productivity fivefold. Possibly more if he has enhanced endurance as well - but there's a limit to the improvements there, since there are after all only so many hours in a day.

Compare this to Kirk using a bulldozer. A really large dozer can lift more than a hundred tons in one scoop - and that's just present day technology, not whatever antimatter-powered anti-gravity tractor beam bulldozers they might have in a few hundred years. One man with a dozer could move more dirt in a day than fifty Khans could ever hope to. And so it goes with almost every arena; who would you bet on, Khan running or Kirk on a motorbike? Khan swimming or Kirk in a speedboat? Over and over, it's the genetic supermen that offer a marginal improvement and the machines that show the true way of the future.

Kirk apparently can't tell his left from his right. He points right and tells Spock to go left, then he points left and say's he'll go right. Apparently, Spock can't tell either because he heads off in the direction Kirk pointed in rather than the way he was told to go.

One of Kor's rules is that no groups of more than three Organians are allowed to meet. However, throughout most of the episode the five member ruling council stays together, including during their meetings with Kor.

When Kirk orders the satellite energized, Sulu is sitting at his usual position at the helm. When the scene cuts to a wider shot he has vanished and been replaced by a guy in a red shirt.

When the Denevans first attack the landing party, Kirk, Spock, McCoy and one of the two redshirts all fire on them - whilst Yeoman Zahra and the second redshirt stands in the background doing nothing. The redshirt seems to hold his fire because the other officers are blocking his line of sight, so he just holds his phaser at the ready instead. Zahra just stands there... but then she has no choice - because closeups of her walking around show that she's not armed! Now it's not technically her job to be shooting people - Kirk makes clear in the transporter room that she's along to make a full record of everything they see and do on the surface. But even McCoy carries and uses a phaser. Surely Zahra should have at least been carrying one so she could defend herself if she got separated from the rest of the party. So why wasn't she armed? Could it have possibly been because she was (gasp!) a woman?

Kirk says he will not reveal Cochrane's existence. So what's he going to do about Hedford? She's an important woman, and she's vanished without trace. Even if McCoy fakes up a death certificate, wouldn't the absence of a body be somewhat hard to explain?

One of the shots of the Enterprise in space is a mirror image, with the ship's registry number shown backwards. This is fixed in the remastered episode.

The whole mission of the Enterprise would appear to be in gross violation of the prime Directive. The Capellans are clearly a pre-warp civilisation, and as Kirk and McCoy described it in "Bread and Circuses", this should mean "No identification of self or mission. No interference with the social development of said planet. No references to space, or the fact that there are other worlds, or more advanced civilisations." Not only is agreeing a mining deal with them against this, the officers directly interfere with Capellan laws and customs, even to the extent of essentially choosing the next two leaders of the planet in their favour! True that's not the actual intent, but there were many points along the way where Kirk could have done things differently to remain within Capellan custom; not touch Eleen in the first place, leave her behind when he made his escape, etc. That he didn't was purely down to his own sense of ethics and desire to get what the Federation wanted off the Capellans.

Whilst the appearance of the Klingon D-7 cruiser is certainly a much better special effect than the coloured blob seen before, it creates a potential problem for the episode. Kras describes his ship as "A small scout ship" - yet the D-7 is a large cruiser, on a par with the Enterprise itself. However, there is a reasonable explanation for this - If Kras had told Kirk a cruiser was in orbit, the Captain would likely have beamed straight back up to the Enterprise. By lying and claiming that it was a small scout ship he keeps Kirk on the surface and, at least in theory, gives his ship the best chance of dealing with the Enterprise. Unfortunately for him it didn't quite work out that way!

Apollo generates an energy field in the shape of a giant hand to hold the Enterprise in position. The crew manage to punch a hole in the field to fire through, yet when we see the ship fire, the hand has vanished completely.

T'Pau is a very influential and important person in the Federation. How do you suppose she will react when she discovers, a few weeks or months after this episode, that Kirk is in fact alive and well and that she was subjected to a con trick?

After Kirk is dead McCoy informs Spock that strange as it may seem, he is Captain of the Enterprise now. Seriously? Starfleet regulations allow an officer to rise to command by murdering his Captain?! What is this, the Mirror Universe?!

Is neutronium transparent? Stars are clearly visible through the Doomsday machine's neutronium hull on several occasions.

Since Decker is so determined to destroy the doomsday machine, why does he never once fire photon torpedoes at it?

We are told that the antimatter aboard the Constellation has been "deactivated". This really should be impossible. I suppose that one might imagine that the doomsday machine's dampening field somehow changed the antimatter into normal matter somehow...?

Now I must admit that I've never walked a pretty girl home through dense fog... but if I did, I suspect I could find something better to do than wander off out of sight to "lead the way", as Scotty does in this episode. Surely the point is to actually be with the woman?

Spock declares that Nomad's energy bolts are the equivalent of 90 of their own photon torpedoes. The ship takes three hits from these. Does it really take 270 photon torpedoes to break down the shields of a Starship? Strangely enough, when one of the ship's photons hits Nomad a minute later and causes no damage, Kirk is amazed that anything can survive such a blast. If his own ship can accept hundreds of times this punishment why is it such a big deal that Nomad can take one hit?

So when Nomad zaps Uhura, it apparently wipes out her memory. We later see Christine teaching her how to read English, and we're told she is rapidly relearning all the stuff people know. Um... for one, won't this make Uhura a completely different person? We are, in at least large part, the sum of our experiences. Uhura just lost her entire childhood, every family she ever had, every romantic relationship she ever had, every friendship she ever had... and she's just going to "relearn" all this and come out exactly the way she did before? Really?

And even if she could do that, just how long would it take? I'm sure she's a bright lady, but Starfleet academy alone was a multi year program for her in the first place. Now we're told she is already up to college level and will be back on the job in a week?! Why the hell do you spend years at Starfleet Academy if you can learn it all in under a week?!

And anyway, when Uhura gets frustrated she says something in Swahili, and Chapel asks her to speak English. So they actually taught her Swahili first? And it only took the course of a fraction of the episode to become completely proficient in it? And if Chapel doesn't speak it, then who the hell taught it to Uhura? NONE OF THIS MAKES A LICK OF SENSE!

Why the hell does Stocker send the ship straight into the Neutral Zone? Okay he's no Kirk, but I find it hard to believe that he is so incompetent that he doesn't know or care about the rules regarding trespass into the zone.

When Kirk agrees to allow Klingons onto the station, he says he will send a security guard over for every one of the Klingons. I presume that these guards were actually supposed to follow the Klingons, rather than just wander the station corridors. Yet there are very few redshirts present during the bar fight. Did the security guards sneak off somewhere?

When Kirk breaks Spock and McCoy out of prison, he fires a burst at the lock from his machine gun. Amazingly, this does absolutely no damage to the door. It's almost like Kirk was firing blanks or something! Strangely, the door opens anyway.

Okay, time to take Kirk to task. As part of their efforts to convince him to side with them, the Neo-Romans send Drusilla, a rather attractive female slave, to make his night a little more comfortable, shall we say. Kirk resists a little, but apparently relents - we drift off to the lamp, cut to the next morning, and see Kirk putting on his boots. Maybe they just snuggled, but I really doubt it. Anyway, the point is... Drusilla is a slave. Yes, she tells him that she is happy to do this, but at the end of the day she is not a free person. At the very least she has been raised to believe that a slave should do as her Master tells her, regardless of her own feelings. Quite possibly a refusal or even an unconvincing performance would result in dire, even terminal, consequences for her. There is no way in hell that she can be taken as giving valid consent, or even taken as being capable of giving valid consent. And Kirk just does her anyway? What the hell, dude? That's NOT cool.

When McCoy heats up some rocks in the cave, we get a really nice close up of him firing the phaser. Or rather, we get a really nice close up of him keeping his hand perfectly still as the phaser fires itself.

So, the whole slapping Spock in the face thing. First, it's to get him to consciousness. Yet his eyes are open, he recognises Nurse Chapel, he asks her to do it, listens to her say no, then insists she do it. Doesn't that mean that he is already conscious? I mean, he's awake, aware, responsive... what more is there to being conscious?

And on that subject, M'Benga simply leaves the instruction to "do whatever he says". Yet when he comes in he shows that he knew in advance exactly what Spock would ask for and why. Isn't it rather poor practice not to have warned Christine in advance what would be expected? Surely it's just basic common sense that the nursing staff should be as prepared as possible for the situation, and it would have saved Chapel from considerable stress.

And if this is a Vulcan thing, then why did nobody ever have to slap Sarek awake in Journey to Babel? Why has nobody ever had to slap Tuvok or T'Pol awake during the many times we've seen them in sickbay?

The crew state that flintlocks would be the first type of firearms people would develop. Actually judging from Earth history that would more likely be the matchlock. The flintlock came along centuries later.

Kirk is told that in his last fight, he must stay in a yellow zone and his opponents in the blue. Trespass into an opponents zone will cost you a weapon. Despite this, both sides routinely trespass throughout the fight without any penalty being imposed.

Spock claims that the detonation of an ounce of antimatter will rip half a planet's atmosphere off. In fact, this much antimatter would 'only' yield a maximum of about one megaton, enough to destroy a single city.

In this episode Spock states that tritanium is 21.4 times as hard as diamond... yet in "Arena", Kirk claims that diamonds are "perhaps the hardest substance known in the universe".

Regular background cast member Eddie Paskey is killed in this episode. Nevertheless, he continues to appear in future episodes. Presumably an identical twin?

Why do they set the antimatter charge to detonate after seven minutes? This is just barely enough time for them to escape, yet there is never any reason given why they couldn't make it ten minutes, or ten hours for that matter.

Spock states that the creature is invading our galaxy "like a virus". A Virus reproduces by injecting DNA into the cells of the host and reprogramming them to produce more viruses. This creature is a fully functional cell, capable of reproducing itself. So in point of fact the creature is invading our galaxy like a bacteria, not a virus.

Kirk's attempts to use the car are hilarious indeed... but I find it hard to believe that in such a lawless society the owner left the keys in it! And in any case, why not have the Enterprise beam him to his destination?

As our quotes section shows, Krako at one point claims that he's never been arrested in his life. But this raises an interesting point... if this culture is indeed based on old Chicago, then does that include systems of government, police and courts? Krako's line seems to indicate that it does, and certainly one would expect a book about the 1920s mobs to mention a good deal about law enforcement efforts, government corruption, etc... but if that is so, then Kirk's actions here amount to aiding an overthrow of the elected government! I mean, imagine if a bunch of space aliens with advanced technology had turned up in the actual 1920s Chicago and told the mobsters there that they must take over the planet. Bit of a nightmare scenario, really, yes?

Why does Kirk get so worked up when Scotty and Spock suggest destroying the ship? He threatens the very same thing himself when Bele seizes control in a few months time, and all he wanted to do was go to a planet in our own galaxy. And of course, he will ultimately carry out the destruction of the ship rather than let the Klingons seize it in Star Trek III.

Supposedly, the aliens transfer their host's personality into the spherical containers when they take control of the body. Yet at the end Sargon and Thalassa occupy Kirk and Mulhall for a last moment, after all the containers have been destroyed. So where do the host's minds go?

In Kirk's quote, he asks whether McCoy wishes that the first Apollo mission hadn't reached the moon. In point of fact the first Apollo mission didn't reach the moon - it never even launched, thanks to the tragic fire which killed the astronauts. Several more flights tested various systems and procedures, and although some of these orbited the moon - which may be close enough to count as reaching it, in Kirk's mind - it was not until Apollo 11 that a landing took place.

Kirk and co. find it incredible that a group of Nazis exist on an alien planet. Yet they found it perfectly reasonable that a Roman society could develop in "Bread and Circuses", only nine episodes ago. They claim it is a perfect example of "Hodgkin's law of parallel planetary development". So why are the Nazis any different?

Gill claims that Nazi Germany was the "most efficient state Earth ever knew." Whilst this view was believed at the time of the episode production, today historians point out that in fact the German state was rather inefficient, dominated by huge competing bureaucracies. During the war the Germans never mobilised their population and economy to the extent that the British and Americans did until it was far too late - for example, women in Germany were never called up into the military and industry the way they were by the Allies, until Germany itself was all but overrun. There was also a strong tendancy to announce grand sweeping projects which rarely lived up to the hype - consider the much touted Nazi success of the autobahn system, for instance. Designed as a public works project, the plan actually pre-dated the Nazis by many years. Whilst it was the Nazis that ended up implementing it, road construction never employed more than a quarter of the workers it was intended to. And since car ownership was rare in Germany - especially since Hitler's "people's car" never went into production under the Nazis - what they ended up with were roads that almost nobody could actually use. At the height of autobahn building, only one German in sixty owned a car. And that was a success story, as Nazi projects went. Or consider that the Nazis spent as much money and effort on the V-2 project as the US did on the Manhattan project - and for their efforts, they got a weapon that repeated the failed "terror bombing" tactic whilst doing absolutely nothing useful in the fight against the allies.

The Woden freighter seen in this episode is a re-use of Khan's DY-100 ship. That was supposed to have been built in the mid 1990s, are these ships still in service 270 years later? This nit is fixed in the remastered episode, which replaces the ship with a copy of the Antares seen in "Charlie X".

Daystrom asks the M-5 what the penalty for murder is, and it replies that the penalty is death. Is that so? We've been told before that Starfleet only uses the death penalty for violation of the quarantine zone around the Talos system. It doesn't punish murder with death. In fairness, Daystrom might believe that murder deserves the death penalty, and the M-5's mind would thus have that same belief.

Kirk is amazed that Tracey would dare interfere in another culture in this episode. He says that a Starship captain would give his life, sacrifice his ship and its entire crew rather than do such a heinous thing. There follows a list of episodes in which Kirk has interfered with other cultures: "The Apple", "Miri", "The Return of the Archons", "A Taste of Armageddon", "This Side of Paradise", "Errand of Mercy", "Mirror, Mirror" and "Friday's Child". This is not a complete list, but I trust the point has been made.

When the Klingon ship makes an attack, it is reported to be travelling at warp speed. Shortly afterwards, Sulu calls off the range to the ship in kilometres, but the rate at which the range numbers change is way too slow for a ship doing faster than light speeds. It's possible that the Klingon ship slowed to impulse, but it's odd that nobody commented on this if it happened.

Speaking of the Klingon attack, several shots of the bridge show somebody else sitting in Chekov's chair.

When Kirk and Elan are arguing, she says "If I have to stay here for ten light years, I will not be soiled by any contact with you!" This is the only time I know of that TOS fell into the old error of thinking that a light year is a measure of time rather than distance! Bad form! However... consider that it is Elan that says it, and the point of her character is that she is this spoiled brat who is unwise in the ways of the real world. Could it possibly be that this is actually a subtle bit of writing in which Elan is supposed to have been in error? I report, you decide!

When the Romulans first surround our heroes, one of their officers declares that "you have been identified as the Starship Enterprise". Good call, dude - it says "USS Enterprise" in twenty foot high letters right across the ship's hull!

When Kirk and Spock beam over to the Romulan flagship, it is agreed that two Romulan officers will beam to the Enterprise to act as hostages. All well and good - but when the Romulans beam aboard, the very first thing they do is pull their disrupter pistols and run off the transport pad as if they're about to start shooting! And oddly, Scotty responds to this by just standing there and giving them a stern look. So why on Earth are the Romulans pointing guns when they've agreed to be hostages? Is it some attempt to seize the transporter room and beam themselves back? That makes no sense because even though it's only Scotty standing there unarmed, we later learn that they are indeed in custody aboard the Enterprise. So are they just trying to appear intimidating or something? If I'd been the one in charge there would have been a couple of redshirts waiting with phasers out... and that little stunt would have gotten both of them stunned.

When the Vians torture Kirk they remove his uniform top, only to put it back on him when they send him back. Obviously they didn't want to get it all bloody or anything. Considerate torturers, these Vians.

At the end of Kirk's memorial service, Spock calls the crew to attention. Everybody stands, but their arms are all over the place - some behind their backs, some in front, some at the sides. I know Starfleet don't go in for all this military drill stuff in a big way, but really I would have thought they would make a better showing for this occasion.

When Kirk fires at Deela, she steps out of the way of his phaser beam. Even assuming that this acceleration thing can make her move at a significant fraction of lightspeed, she would be going millions of times normal. But that would mean that for every minute which passed for the normal speed folk, a couple of years would pass for her. Since Spock had time to analyse the Scalosian water and come up with a counter-agent, Kirk would be an old man or dead by the time he got to him.

Before Losira kills the Engineer on the Enterprise, she describes one or two of the ship's functions to him. He calls out to Scotty that a strange woman knows every detail of the ship's systems. I know he was caught by surprise here, but this seems like a rather sweeping exaggeration.

Spock claims that the planet has a size about equal to Earth's moon, and yet a mass about equal to the Earth itself. This allows one to calculate the surface gravity of the planet, and it comes out to 13.5 times Earth's own gravity. That would make the men on the surface weigh something like a ton each! To be fair, Kirk does respond to the size and mass figures by saying "that would be difficult to explain", so it may just be that this isn't so much a mistake as an example of just how weird and inexplicable this planet is.

When Kirk tries to bury D'Amato he phasers the ground and discovers a red rock that the phaser won't cut through. He then phasers another spot about ten feet away and they see the same red rock. McCoy then comments that the whole planet must be made of this stuff. Really, Doctor? From sampling two spots on the ground, both in close proximity, you generalise to the entire planet?! Hell, we SEE rocks sticking up out of the ground that aren't red like this stuff!

Kirk makes a log entry on Stardate 5730.7, then dates his next log as 5730.6. Is he going backwards in time?

When Bele first takes over the ship, Chekov reports that they are on course four-oh-three mark seven. Spock confirms this, and then states that Cheron lies "between four-oh-three mark seven, and mark nine." Isn't this a rather awkward thing to say? Surely he should have said that Cheron lies on heading four-oh-three mark eight?

Under Bele's control, the Enterprise accelerates to Warp 10. Yet there is nothing of the rising whine of the Engines that always accompanies such acceleration. So is Bele controlling the ship to make it go at Warp 10, or is he using his power to actually physically push it through space at high warp whilst the engines idle along as normal? Because if it's the former, there should be an accompanying engine noise, and if it's the latter, that's one hell of a feat for a single person to be capable of. It would make Bele and Loki so powerful that it's rather incredible, even for Star Trek.

Surely there are any number of things Spock could have done when faced with the two Kirks. For instance, he could have stunned both of them and then had a hundred security personnel beam down from the ship to deal with the problem while he sorted Garth and Kirk out at his leisure.

Garth has an explosive so powerful that one flask of it can vaporize an entire planet? Hardly seems likely, that's far more powerful than even an antimatter reaction. Still, the drop used on Marta doesn't do much and Garth is insane after all, so maybe he's just delusional.

When Kirk tries to contact the crew on the empty Enterprise, we get several shots of empty corridors and rooms. Strangely, sickbay seems to be on red alert.

A key plot point of this episode is a deliberate confusion over beam down co-ordinates. Spock performs the transport when Kirk beams down (presumably the transporter chief was on his break or something), and is given the co-ordinates 875-020-079. They are read to him very carefully by Uhura, three digits at a time, and Spock repeats each group of three back to her to be sure he has them right. Then, when Kirk turns out to be missing, Spock asks the Gideon people for the co-ordinates again and is again given 875-020-079. Later in the episode, they decide to test the transporter by beaming somebody up from the Gideon council chamber and are given the co-ordinates 875-020-709. Two of the digits in the last set have been transposed... yet apparently this is not noticed. By Spock. Spock! It is, just barely, conceivable that a crewmember might not notice that these co-ordinates differ. One would think there would be checks and safeguards in place for this kind of thing, given that messing up a number like this could beam somebody down inside a wall or something. Yet mistakes are made even by professionals, and after all the numbers are very similar. And people do sometimes have a tendency to see what they expect to see. But Spock?! The man with a mind like a computer, who routinely cites obscure facts and figures from memory, who can calculate the odds of pretty much any given event in an instant. He was present both times, clearly heard both sets of figures, and he did not notice the discrepancy right away? I find this inconceivable!

Interestingly, Gideon shows absolutely no signs of mass habitation. From Earth orbit the effects of Human habitation of our planet are clearly visible, especially at night when the lights of cities can easily be seen. One might expect that Gideon would be a planet of of vast sprawling cities, perhaps even one of those "planet cities" so beloved of sci-fi, like Asimov's Trantor. One might suggest that the Gideons all live underground, and use the surface for agriculture or something - but that's not really possible, since Odona states that "there is no place... no street, no house, no garden, no beach, no mountain that is not filled with people. Each one of us would kill in order to find a place alone to himself." Clearly the surface is meant to be crammed with people, so there must be dwellings, roads, houses, all that stuff. Yet we see absolutely nothing, even on the remastered version.

Are we really supposed to believe that the deep thrumming sound Kirk and Odona hear is the sound of the heartbeats of all the people outside? Because that's just absurd.

Spock tells Zarabeth that he comes from a world "millions of light years away". Our galaxy is no more than a hundred thousand light years from end to end, and Spock has previously demonstrated amazement at the thought of intergalactic travel in anything less than millennia. He can't be millions of light years from home.

When Zarabeth offers Spock meat to eat, she comments that there is "not much else to eat around here," which Spock thinks is perfectly reasonable. One hesitates to speculate on the nature of an alien biology, but it really should be impossible for animals to comprise most of the food. After all, what are all these animals eating? The base of any ecology should be a mass of plant life, with animals comprising significantly less mass. One might speculate that this isn't true on Sarpeidon, or that the plantlife is inedible to the natives but not to the animals, but it seems odd that Spock would so readily agree to the idea.

Astoundingly, Lieutenant Galloway returns to life for this episode after being vapourised by Captain Tracey in "The Omega Glory"!

When Lester orders Kirk's execution, Chekov and Sulu object that Starfleet have forbidden the death penalty. Sulu states that "There's only one exception," and Chekov adds "General Order 4. And it has not been violated by any officer on the Enterprise." Well in point of fact, according to "The Menagerie" General Order 7 is the only order in Starfleet which carries the death penalty. And that order forbids any Starfleet vessel from visiting the planet Talos IV... which is an order Spock, specifically, HAS broken - and so has every other officer on the Enterprise!